Green ≠ Sensible

No doubt, the term “Green” can represent sustainable practices in the design and construction industry but the word has been abused and exploited to such an extent that, without an explanation and data, without looking at the whole picture, the term doesn’t really mean much. We’ve been designing and building houses for over 15 years in the northwest and when we hear the term “Green” without any supplementary information, we have no idea what it actually means. Ask 10 architects and builders for the definition of “Green design” and you’ll most likely get 10 different and vague answers.

We’ve all heard the stories…

–the 15,000 square foot house built with “green construction practices”. When a house of this size is occupied by a family of four (or sometimes less) there’s nothing green or sustainable about it.

-the building praised as “green” by the city because the windows exceed the insulation values of the energy code. Never mind that the stone façade was shipped from a rock quarry in Italy using enough fuel via boats and trucks to easily negate the energy savings.

-the condominium building marketed as “green living”. Despite the recycled materials, it was designed and built so poorly that the entire skin will need to be discarded and replaced within 10 years.

-blocks and blocks of “green-built” homes. But because of their shoddy, short-sighted construction, their lack of life-span makes them disposable.

Do a Google search for “green construction” and you’ll find a roster that includes everything from legitimately sustainable projects to completely bastardized marketing spins. How do we move forward with such a murky and sometimes contrasting definition of green? We all want a better built environment; no one truly wants diminishing returns in the sustainability of our built environment. At its core, green design is a solid idea. Yet now that the schlock developers and marketing scheisters have fully learned to manipulate the concept, the term in-and-of-itself is meaningless. How do we, as architects, homeowners, or just a conscientious public distinguish the authentic from the untrustworthy? How do we move forward?

We’ve been scratching our heads here at the BUILDblog and we’ve got two checklist items for architects and two for homeowners which will help us all keep the train from falling off the tracks.

For ARCHITECTS

1. Create a statement of green/sustainable/sensible design. It might not be entirely comprehensive or complete but it gives potential clients, possible employees and admiring students an idea of where you’re coming from. For a departure point, you can check out our sustainability statement here.

2. There are a handful of professional evaluation organizations in the design and construction industry like LEED and FSC. While these organizations have a solid mission statement and good intentions, they are gradually being manipulated by lobbyists and other interest groups that will eventually negate the very purpose of these organizations. It’s our job as architects to keep these groups in check. Visit links like this to keep the math legitimate and register your opinion here to stay in the conversation. Be involved, matter.

for HOMEOWNERS

1. Use the litmus test of good old fashioned sensible design. If it says it’s green but it just doesn’t seem sensible, then it’s probably not green or sustainable. A single family “green built” house with a 4 car garage is not sensible design. Nor is it green, we don’t care what the garage doors were recycled from.

2. Do your homework when selecting an architect and hunt down their statement of green/sustainable/sensible design. If they don’t have one, that should be a red flag.

14 Comments

I just read in David Owens’s “Green Metropolis” that it’s not necessarily the Hummer that makes suburbia unsustainable, it’s everything that the Hummer enables–for example that lawn grass is by far and away the biggest irrigated crop in the US, that greater Phoenix occupies 200 times the land area that Manhattan does but houses only twice the people, and uses much more energy and water.

Wendell Berry said that we need to ask:
What is here?
What will nature allow us to do here?
What will nature help us do here?

Well stated indeed. Although I’m guilty of occupying a single family home, I justify this (mostly to myself) by at least inhabiting a small piece of dirt in an urban setting. But, I’m still guilty of buying into the “American Dream” that is quickly leading us into an upcoming nightmare. My big concern is the current abandoning of huge swaths of homes in outlying areas (see California), or in inner cities (see most formerly cities in Michigan) because of our cultural inability to change the picture burned in our heads of single-family homes with a dormer, one door, four windows and smoke coming out of the chimney.

1. I was tired of green-eye-wash back at Expo 2008… there were PVC pipe manufacturers there, as an example, and many others that no one who organized even checked – company background, product quality, manufacturing, use, etc. If you put out an event of such a nature (this was the great USGBC, but there are many around the country), you need to do your homework on who should be allowed to exhibit there. Unknowledgeable architects had no idea how to judge the things they saw. There was a feeling that it’s all great and good without much doubt. I didn’t see many people asking questions.

2. Also at that event, a lot of time was spent praising things, people giving each other a pat on the back, an award or two, not as much on education and information as I had hoped. Felt very corporate in its congratulatory big brother nature and pushed me to want nothing to do with LEED.

3. LEED is ridiculously complicated now requiring a person completing a checklist to have a degree for every building use… if we don’t need degrees to read and use the building code then we should be able to follow a green code without having to be certified and take continuing education credits. It’s all about money now, it seems. The organization has grown so huge it’s looking for ways of supporting itself.

4. LEED is flawed anyway because it uses the engineered checklist to green design in a very single-minded simplistic perfunctory way. If you check off enough things, well by golly, you’ve done great, you have yourself a green building. A lot of the things to check are easy to achieve and require very little effort. It is not presented as a holistic approach that actually educates. Very little information on climate and context are in there, if at all, and absolutely nothing on the social aspect of sustainability (well, ok, a little in the neighborhood development one such as having enough openings along a facade and none on the psychological aspects.

5. There is another program which is great/better, but hard to implement that the Cascadia USGBC (where you are) implemented called Living Building Challenge. It has no points, just 7 or so requirements, which are very difficult: zero energy, zero water, but also nice as one is for inspiration!

6. I totally agree on the over-sized house. Not only is it a waste of space, but it is socially alienating to live in something like that. I wouldn’t personally like it. I like to see people. It is really healthy to live close to people and be in touch with people. The “green” movement doesn’t discuss it but depression in our society is (I think) linked to urban sprawl and the alienation caused by wealth (not lots of wealth, just enough to give each person their place away from others).

(Literally) Wearing my green sweater, I wish you a healthy dinner filled with lots of veggies!

HERE’S MY BEEF: most architects these days (at least many that I have associated with) are so hard up and desperate for work that they have thrown their morals and values out the window….

any architect that takes a commission to design a 25,000+ sf home for a microsoft executive in the middle of nowhere (and I can name one firm in particular, but will not) should not be allowed to practice this great art that we all cherish, love, and protect….in my opinion this should be a given in our profession. Any project that swallows materials like a garbage disposal should be outlawed! Luckily the state of our economy is halting such developments!

It is sad, but the few bad seeds out there are the ones exploiting the movement for profit…I can’t think of a bigger hypocritical move than this. The entire green movement is bullsh*t. LEED is bullsh*t…the only thing I think is relevant is the passive house movement and the living building challenge. These are not profit-driven movements such as the hoax that has been provided by LEED…what a sham!

IMHO building “green” should be the standard. We as architects have the responsibility to have judgment.

Sorry if I offended any of you “LEED Accredited professionals” or whatever you call yourselves to get more work.

As a LEED AP and current passivhaus consultant trainee, I’ll gladly second Nick’s sentiment that LEED is fairly ineffective, and that Passivhaus and LBC are significantly more viable options for reducing energy demand here in the states. There are more certified Passivhaus housing units than there are LEED units, yet globally there are 100x as many LEED APs as there are passivhaus consultants.

LEED doesn’t mandate significant energy reductions. Sure, utilization of recycled materials, regional materials, etc. is all fine and dandy, but the total embodied energy of a building is dwarfed by the amount of energy for heating and cooling. Passivhaus and LBC get that number down significantly. Furthermore, almost everyone I’ve met in the Passivhaus community is already committed to the ideals of LBC – things like regional materials, water conservation are already high on their list. You would expect this from people that are literally counting the BTUs that it takes to heat and/or cool their buildings.

I recently attended a lecture by a highly regarded Northwest architect who stated all his buildings were designed to LEED Gold (although none of them are on the LEED database), as if this was a profound act that made him a ‘green’ architect. In my mind, LEED Gold is the baseline, is this really what we should be bragging about? A $40,000,000 museum and you can’t even significantly reduce the energy demand? Herr Zumthor certainly took an effective shot w/ the TABS (thermally activated building system) for Kunsthaus Bregenz: http://www.keep-cool.eu/System/FileArchive/175/File_12331.pdf

We’ll never reach 2030 goals with carpool spots, bike racks and low VOC paint. Energy is the top issue with regards to ‘sustainability’ – if we don’t solve this one, none of the other matter.

I love you guys and your blog but this is a total hit and run topic. I read through some of the comments here and I can’t disagree with them in spirit but let’s honestly recognize that specifics are difficult to get into. For every good example I can give you a bad and vice versa – this is one of the easiest topics to pick a side and play devil’s advocate.
I am not a fan of LEED despite having received my accreditation 5 years ago. It is a cottage industry and it appears to be more about marketing and branding now. However, due to the interest and momentum the LEED created, we can thank them for driving the market that generated many of the new options and technology that currently exists which also made these items within financial reach of the average consumer.
This holier than thou attitude about architects selling their souls and chucking their values out the window just so they get work is really absurd. My 5 year old can’t read ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’ so I suppose why bother learning to read at all. It’s the same logic as seeing a large house with green features and considering it worthless. It’s this all or nothing attitude that I find insulting to my intelligence. You have to learn to walk before you run – everyone is in a period of learning – which includes how they think about things that used to be taken for granted. I don’t think it’s very sustainable to design a modern box house that is so intrinsic to its current owner that the next guy is going to tear it down in order to get something that suits his particular needs. For that matter, shouldn’t all houses look identical so there isn’t any waste? Architects have always pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and building technology and by extension there are going to be misses which turn into disposable projects, I get that. Just step down a rung or two while looking down on the everyone else and consider the alternative to this process.

sorry if I came off as an a**hole…I just get a little mad when I think of LEED and how they have convinced the country that it is the new “green” standard. I get angry when I think of how they dooped us architects into rushing to get accredited because it was what industry was moving towards.

I didn’t mean to offend anyone that is LEED AP. I know it was a difficult process getting accredited….in fact some of my best friends are LEED AP.

I am looking into training to become a PassiveHaus Certified consultant. Unfortunately the closest seminars are in Denver, CO and are on two separate occasions, not to mention it costs a pretty penny.

PS: Mike, you hit the nail on the head! Great commentary, I wish I could express my thoughts so eloquently….damn emotions always get in the way.

@ Bob – “Hit and run topic” is a good way to put it. It’s a precarious subject matter and one we’ve been unsure of how to approach. Writing the post, it was either becoming a thesis dissertation or a rant – if nothing else we’re hoping it gets the conversation started. Hearing about other people’s experiences helps us get our own system and attitude better calibrated. Thanks for the input – very good assessment and kudos for keeping optimistic about the material.

@Nick,
The PH training is not as cheap as I wish it was (let’s be honest, my thoughts are this should be open source or CC for maximum effect). I would recommend getting a copy of the PHPP/demo and fooling around with it. I know a handful of firms that have done this to work on their PH projects, in lieu of the costs of consultant training.

You should contact Mike Kernagis @ PHIUS to see if there will be an opportunity for classes in the southwest next year. We’ve got an attendee from NM in our class in Seattle this year.

Don’t I sound mean? Didn’t mean for this to come across in a matter that belittles the seriousness of the topic. I agree that we aren’t there and I imagine that complaining about the process is actually doing some good, forcing the re-evaluation of the system. It’s going to take a while to get people to change their way of thinking and I beleive that a key part in this transformation will the our role as educators; both within the profession and to our clients. We are still service providors and we can lead our clients to green water but we can’t make them drink.

some very good observations here. after working on a dining hall for a 6-12 school that has plans for LEED platinum soon, I have a few of my own annoyances about some specific items.

1] The point credit system is fatally flawed. ex: how does adding more bicycle racks on a campus where most of the students are dropped off by their parents [due to proximity and location] have any relevance? A performance based system [like passivehaus] seems much more thorough and adaptable to regional climate but how can we apply allowances to rural vs. urban setting?

2] Lack of regional focus. Buildings here in Colorado have very specific needs in regards to local climate and that climate can even vary drastically across the entire state. Freeze/thaw is a huge factor here where the temperature can sometimes swing almost 80 degrees in a 24 hour period. we get lots of sun and have very limited water supply, getting only 16 inches of precipitation per year. LEED attempts to cover the lack of focus by introducing “baseline calculations”. but these are baseline calcs based upon where and for whom?

3] rapidly renewable material classifications are a total joke [defined as 10 year mature growth rate or less] and limits the material options down quite a bit. in order to achieve these points, we must purchase thousands of dollars of bamboo flooring [or whatever] that gets shipped from Asia. if you want the super durable stuff, it costs double. Some local aspen wood can take only 15 years to grow fully mature and is a fairly durable wood, but of course is not on the list.

4] Lack of Passive Design focus. Heat from the sun or earth, ventilation from the wind are theoretically free to use, you just need to pay for the collection method. A well oriented building on the site has significantly lower cost than purchasing PVs for the roof that are less efficient and high price tag.

5] Too much focus on mechanical systems [active]. Over 1/3rd of the LEED points for platinum are the responsibility of the mechanical engineer’s technologically activated control systems. As with #4 above, 80% of the cost but 20% of the return. what about opening a window?

that is a very concentrated list, but they are some of the major flaws I’ve come across so far. it seems like the most basic fundamentals of design are overlooked in favor of boosting the sales of systems to “make the world go around” and boost the economy. the LEED system makes it very obvious that this is part of the goal: to make “green-ness” economically attractive and marketable to those who can afford it.